Last year, when Maxine Williams started her new job as Facebook’s global head of diversity, her first priority wasn’t to eradicate hiring bias or make compensation more fair. It was to have people not turn around and walk the other way when they saw her coming down the hallway. “Diversity had this reputation — ‘Oh God, she’s coming to talk to us about diversity,’” Williams recalls. “You think of that episode of ‘The Office.’”

No one’s rolling their eyes and edging toward the nearest exit now. Diversity is topic No. 1 in the tech industry these days, and nowhere more so than at Facebook. In large part, that’s attributable to the influence of Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand woman and author of the feminism-in-the-workplace manifesto “Lean In.”

But give Williams her share of the credit. In person, the former soap opera star, human rights lawyer and improv comedian is every bit as dynamic as her frantic biography suggests. She’s the kind of outsize personality you don’t expect to find in the fluorescent-lit coding warrens of Silicon Valley, and she uses her commanding stage presence to get people listening to what she has to say. I talked to her over the summer on Facebook’s campus, a few weeks shy of her first anniversary on the job.

FORBES: Tell me about the state of diversity at Facebook when you arrived.

MAXINE WILLIAMS: From what I can tell, before I came, there was an interest in diversity. People were absolutely willing for it to happen. But there was no intentionality around it.* All they had was goodwill.

Now, we’re in a moment of bounty. I feel I’m living in a moment where I can get whatever I need to accomplish the goals that I set, and I’ve lived long enough to know those moments don’t last forever and they don’t come around all the time, so I have to take advantage of it and keep that momentum going. Although I haven’t been at Facebook before. Maybe Facebook is just a place of Eden.

What are the constraints on progress at a place like Facebook?

People have to believe in what you’re saying, and that requires that you speak in a language they understand, that you appeal to something they think is a target. There are so many demands on people’s time, on everything, on all their resources. I think the biggest constraint is: Does this make sense? What do I need to do about it? Can I see a clear end? It’s this whole thing about, “What are your metrics?”

So what are your metrics? How do you know if what you’re doing is working?

It’s hard to measure. But what it’s been doing is giving everyone confidence in the mission. When I walk into a room and say “I need five people to do these four tasks, and here’s why it’s important,” I always walk out with a yes. We capitalized on the good will by concretizing things for them in a way. They kind of knew diversity would be a good thing for them, but they hadn’t thought more deeply about why. So I framed it for them around a concept of cognitive diversity.

What’s cognitive diversity?

Cognitive diversity is simply having people with different thought processes, different experiences, applying their perspectives to complex problems. There’s a guy named Scott E. Page who’s a professor of complex systems, who’s written a book called “The Difference.” At the end of the day, where you’re trying to solve complex problems, diversity will give you a net benefit, even though the management of it will be much harder than if you had a homogeneous team. Homogeneous teams are much more efficient when you’re solving simple problems, like an assembly line. You don’t want a lot of difference of opinion about where every nut and bolt goes. That’s friction. But when you have complex problems to solve, diversity matters.

So now I give a speech at new hire orientation every Monday morning. The first day they arrive, they see me before they go to lunch. I talk about balance between inquisitiveness and forgiveness. I say: This needs to be a space where people can ask stupid questions and then be forgiven. In the typical workplace that has employment lawyers, nobody wants you asking stupid questions because they could be offensive. You don’t want to ask that black person, “Do you wash your hair?” You just don’t. It raises risk. You don’t want to ask that woman about her pregnancy. All of these are protected characteristics. So we become hesitant to engage.

We’ve flipped that around. I’ve said to people: It’s okay to ask those things, but then I want you to forgive people when they ask stupid questions. What I came to see is the hesitation came because I’m operating in a country that has a heightened sensitivity around race, where quite frankly white people are afraid to engage. They’re afraid of stepping in the wrong place. When you have that fear, when you have people who are afraid of stepping in the wrong place, you just avoid. You don’t do anything.

My job here is confronting these things, giving people permission to ask questions. I would literally have conversations with people where they would say to me, [in a whisper] “Can I say the word black?” And I was like, Wow, these were the conversations we’re having? But they didn’t have another person they felt they could ask.

You don’t sound like a big fan of sensitivity.

I think sensitivity was holding us back from being bold on diversity. We were bold on products, right? We would achieve things that you never thought were achievable. But on these issues of identity, there was hesitation and sensitivity. They were well intentioned because they didn’t want to offend, but in not offending, we’re not doing what we say we do, which is moving fast, breaking things, failing harder, done is better than perfect — all of this. Just do it, engage it. But to do that, you have to be at the same time creating an atmosphere where people are willing to forgive.

How do you create an atmosphere for 8,000 people?

I have these three pillars: Be bold on diversity, be intentional about it and recognize it’s everyone’s challenge. The “everyone’s challenge” part is where I feel we can take it further than any other company. If it’s a white or Asian man, which is our majority population, who comes up to me after one of my talks and says, “How can I help more?”, one of the first questions I ask is, “Why did you raise your hand?” Because I want to understand what’s motivating them, because I will not rest until I get every majority man engaged in this, because that’s what’s going to make a difference.

Vice Media cofounder Shane Smith likes to say his company intends to be “the next CNN and the next ESPN and the next MTV.” It’s taking a step in that direction — and in a northernly direction — by striking a deal with Rogers Communications for a $100 million Canadian joint venture.

Under the deal, Vice and Rogers will team up to build a state-of-the-art multimedia production facility in Toronto, where they will co-produce content for television, mobile screens and the web. The content generated will be aimed initially at Canadian audiences, but much of it will be repurposed and distributed in the U.S. and around the globe through Vice’s network of sites, YouTube channels and other properties.

At a press conference to announce the venture, which will have a $100 million budget over its first three years, Smith called it “the most ambitious project we’ve ever done.” To achieve the goal of “a studio that’s totally horizontally and vertically integrated,” he said, Vice needed to find a partner like Rogers, which is Canada’s biggest wireless provider and also one of its top cable television providers.

“You have to have the mobile component. You have to have the online component. You have to have the TV component,” Smith said. “No one’s ever really done it.”

Among the fruits of the deal will be 24-hour channel, Vice TV, distributed to all Rogers Cable households. Vice — which was founded in Montreal before relocating its operations to Brooklyn — has been maneuvering to get hold of a cable channel to call its own in the U.S. It came close several months ago, holding talks with Time Warner about an investment that would have involved Vice giving away some of its equity in exchange for control of the channel that’s now HLN.

Those talks fizzled, and Vice instead took investments from A&E Networks and Technology Crossover Ventures that drove the company’s on-paper worth to more than $2.5 billion. It’s still possible one of A&E’s cable channels will be reformatted as Vice TV.

For now, Vice’s footprint on cable is limited to its half-hour show on HBO, which is slated to run at least through 2016. “HBO was a fantastic experience and what it taught us was there’s a tremendous audience in TV,” Smith said. “There’s a tremendous opportunity in TV, and we were ignoring it. Why? We were stupid.”

For Twitter, old news is bad news. On Monday, the company once again had to tell investors that its strenuous efforts to attract new users met with only middling results in the third quarter. The market reacted much as it did upon receiving similar news in February and May, lopping more than 10% off Twitter’s share price upon the open of trading Tuesday amid a handful of analyst downgrades.

As in previous quarters, Twitter’s saving grace was its revenue performance, which has consistently run ahead of expectations — so consistently, in fact, that CFO Anthony Noto had to warn investors against relying on “projections that meaningfully deviate from our guidance” and betting on a big beat.

But not everyone views Twitter’s advertising sales as something to brag about. In a new note, the financial health ratings service Rapid Ratings International cites sales performance as one of the main factors in its assessment of the company as being at “very high risk.”

While Twitter isn’t in any danger of going under over the next 12 months, RRI gives it a financial health score of only 15 out of 100. Compare that with a 26 for LinkedIn and a 70 for Facebook.

RRI looks at sales performance not in isolation but by weighing operating revenue relative to measures including assets, equity and working capital. Viewed through this filter, “Twitter Inc. is making an exceedingly poor gross return on capital invested” and outperforming only 6% of its peer set, according to RRI’s report.

James Gellert, RRI’s CEO, says a big problem is Twitter is sitting on a lot of cash while giving no clear sign that it can use that war chest to achieve profitability. “What we look at is how well is a company being run, how efficiently is it using its assets to grow its business,” says Gellert. “They’re not yet able to generate the kind of topline growth we’d normally expect to see in a company with the asset size they’ve got.”

“They’ve cashed up, and that cash is now currently an inefficient asset because it’s not assisting them in generating new revenues.”

Among the perks of inventing a new form of technology is the privilege of deciding how its performance ought to be measured. In recent months, Twitter has been relying more and more on that privilege as it seeks to convince investors that its best days are yet to come.

That was very much the case Monday as the company released its third-quarter results, which showed that, once again, the number of people using the platform to send messages or follow other users has slowed, if not to a crawl, then to a rather desultory amble. Twitter gained only 13 million net monthly active users in the quarter, 3 million of them in the U.S. It finished the quarter with 284 million, up from 271 million at the close of the second quarter.

That’s not the sort of growth Wall Street expects to see from a social media firm that went public only one year ago. With each passing quarter, CEO Dick Costolo has promised to accelerate acquisition of new users, whom he called “the fuel that powers the entire system.” But these days, whenever he discusses that goal, he’s careful to place it in the broader context of Twitter’s total audience.

“You should think about the size of our total audience as a series of geometrically eccentric circles,” Costolo told analysts on a conference call to discuss earnings. Core users, ie. those 284 million MAUs, make up only the innermost circle. The next ring out is what Twitter calls “logged-out users on our properties,” an audience that’s up to twice as large as the core. (If you’ve ever browsed a celebrity’s Twitter profile despite not being a member yourself, you’re part of this circle.)

Finally, there’s the outermost ring, which you might call “Innocent bystanders.” They’re the ones who stumble across Twitter passively, maybe even unknowingly, whether by reading a news article with a tweet embedded in it or using an app with one of Twitter’s brand-new software development kits built into it.

“We think about everything we do in the context of this set of geometrically eccentric circles,” Costolo said. Be that as it may, for now, it’s only the bulls-eye that’s driving any meaningful revenues for Twitter. Meanwhile, Twitter’s 18-month-old self-serve advertising offering is “still relatively small compared to the overall business,” said CFO Anthony Noto, while Costolo cautioned that the test of a “Buy now” button doesn’t mean that a full-fledged leap into mobile commerce is just around the corner. “Don’t think that what you’re seeing today is what we’re launching permanently,” he said.

If investors haven’t been more impatient with Twitter, it’s probably because the company has outperformed revenue expectations in each quarter since its public debut. But with the market now having caught up to that little trick, Twitter is vowing to play it straighter going forward, lest it become overreliant on overdelivery. “This quarter, we’re attempting to be more accurate in revenue guidance relative to results,” Noto said. “We do not recommend projections that deviate meaningfully from our guidance.”

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” runs the caption of The New Yorker’s most popular cartoon ever. Amazingly, it was published more than 20 years ago. Much has changed in the intervening time. Now, not only does everyone know you’re a dog, they also probably know where you went to obedience school and what your puppies look like.

But the company that did more than any other to make real identity the standard on the Internet, wants to turn the clock back to the pre-dog-knowing days. Its newest spinoff app, Rooms, is an attempt to recreate the experience of the chatrooms and message boards where discussion flourished in the pre-social media days, where identity was a thing to be constructed rather than verified.

“One of the magical things about the early days of the web was connecting to people who you would never encounter otherwise in your daily life,” writes Josh Miller, the leader of the team that created Rooms within Facebook’s Creative Labs incubator unit. “Forums, message boards and chatrooms were meeting places for people who didn’t necessarily share geographies or social connections, but had something in common. Today, as we spend more time on our phones, primarily to communicate with friends and family, the role of the internet as a “third place” has begun to fade. ”

For the record, Miller, who is 24, spent “the early days of the web” attending nursery school. He says he consulted people like Metafilter founder Matt Haughey and 4Chan founder Chris Poole for guidance on how to capture the spirit of early web communities.

While Facebook has had a tool for group sharing for years, called Groups, Rooms differs from that product in a number of ways. First, it’s designed for mobile, with an Instagram-style scrolling feed as the interface. More to the point, it’s complete divorced from one’s Facebook account or other social profiles. A user creates a Room by sharing a QR code with invitees, and moderators retain control of the discussion. In that respect, it’s not dissimilar from Branch, the startup Miller founded before joining Facebook.

And Rooms was created with the expectation that users will prefer to use pseudonyms rather than their real names. Miller:

One of the things our team loves most about the internet is its potential to let us be whoever we want to be. It doesn’t matter where you live, what you look like or how old you are – all of us are the same size and shape online. This can be liberating, but only if we have places that let us break away from the constraints of our everyday selves. We want the rooms you create to be freeing in this way. From unique obsessions and unconventional hobbies, to personal finance and health-related issues – you can celebrate the sides of yourself that you don’t always show to your friends.

Of course, there are some “unique obsessions and unconventional hobbies” that a company like Facebook would prefer not to empower — child porn trading, drug deals, hate speech, etc. Facebook has historically been intolerant of those sorts of things, even if it hasn’t been especially punctilious about enforcing the rules. How will it police Rooms to discourage the seediest activities while encouraging law-abiding users to feel that what goes on there is their private business? As I’ve said before, if Facebook wants to be a player in the burgeoning realm of anonymous and private sharing, it will have to grapple with some of its fundamental assumptions.

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About Me

I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, including but not limited to the sharing economy, lifehacking, fitness & sports tech and the evolving culture of the Bay Area. In past incarnations I've worked at AOL, Conde Nast Portfolio, Radar and WWD. Circle me on Google+, follow me on Twitter or send me tips or ideas at jbercovici@forbes.com.